The Resties Required Reading List is complete!
Fantastic news: It's a perfect list and people have no complaints!
Listen to this week’s episode
We’ve finalized the Resties Required Reading List and we can’t wait to share the results! We’ve included the full list below, so don’t scroll too far if you rather avoid spoilers before listening to this episode.
Our goal with the project was to collect a list of 25 games — from Pac-Man to modern day, 1980 to 2020 — that will help our listeners better appreciate this wonderful medium. They’re the games that will, in ways both modest and profound, build fresh neural pathways.
Think of the list like a syllabus for Video Games 101, or as the 25 games around which we’d construct a museum. Or think of the list simply as a guide on how to spend some of your holiday break!
For newcomers: Each episode of this series focused on five years of video game history. We picked between two to four games from each half-decade from 1980 to 2020. It was intentionally limited, to both emphasize the importance of each game and make playing the full list a relatively doable achievement.
In the end, our final picks aren’t the “best” games or even our favorite games. And this most definitely isn’t a “Top 100 best video games of all time” sort of list. You can find plenty of those with a quick Google search.
Instead, the Required Reading List has been an exercise in thinking about the countless ways games inform our lives, our culture, and future creators. We hope you’ve enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed creating the series for you!
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The Resties Required Reading List:
Tetris
Pac-Man
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Super Mario Bros.
The Legend of Zelda
SimCity
Street Fighter 2
DOOM
Super Metroid
Super Mario 64
Pokemon Red & Blue
Final Fantasy 7
Starcraft
Chrono Trigger
Grand Theft Auto 3
World of Warcraft
Resident Evil 4
Wii Sports
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Demon’s Souls
Minecraft
Stardew Valley
Fortnite
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Outer Wilds
1980-84 games discussed:
Missile Command, Pac-Man, Adventure, Rogue, Donkey Kong, Tempest, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Robotron 2084, Pitfall, Ms. Pac-Man, Loderunner, Track and Field, Dragon’s Lair, Mario Bros., Tetris, Elite, Duck Hunt, Kung Fu Master, Impossible Missions, King's Quest Jet Set Willy, Marble Madness, Excitebike
Games discussed:
Lunacid, Mario Golf: Advance Tour
This episode’s sponsors:
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Have questions for The Besties?
Drop them in the comments! We aren’t able to respond to every question, but we read all of them and answer some in episodes!
Next week on The Besties:
The Besties Besty Bracket begings this Friday! This is our big annual event. If you’ve ever considered sharing the show with a friend, now’s the time!
Bonus links:
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas
The trailer for Earthbound USA, a documentary about… well, Earthbound
Werner Herzog on skateboarding
The Steam Deck OLED is an emulation dream
A massively influential early 80s game that I thought could have bore some consideration—and could have been the permadeath roguelike on your list!—is Oregon Trail (the first graphical version, the one that gets dysentery-memed, etc). It is and will forever be the greatest of educational games, a touchstone for survival games, and as I say, the version of Rogue that everyone actually played.
I’ll spare you my rhapsody on ZORK.
Nice work, gentlemen!
I just wanted to say that I think Chris and Russ (and Justin to a lesser extent, on occasion) are really doing themselves a disservice by couching these discussions in a super anti-intellectual "blegh, smart things are boring, games are just fun and silly" setting - I think you guys have genuinely smart and insightful things to say about games, that are interesting and add immensely to the cultural conversation. Calling this list something for "snobby assholes at a party" lessens both yourselves (after doing a significant amount of intellectual labor!) AND your listeners! We're smart! You're smart! Those things aren't incompatible with liking games, and I really wish you'd stop saying as much.